Technology will revolutionise agriculture and retail

Subject

Food technology.

Significance

Venture capital funding into food tech startups in 2018 had reached nearly 2.6 billion dollars by August after investment into the global food tech industry surpassed 2 billion dollars in each of 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017. The food tech ecosystem encompasses food engineering, output and deliveries.

Impacts

• Food tech will increasingly adopt other sectors' science and technology advances, including robotics in delivery and gene editing in design.
• As new technologies are applied to enhancing and distributing food, research and investment into food safety technology will surge.
• Regulatory bodies will rethink their evaluation methods as food engineering converges with pharmaceutical and drug development.
• Anti-malnutrition schemes will innovate to improve logistics and quality to address scarcity, assuming enough funding can be secured.